This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Friday, July 11, 2014

"Begin Again": a genre romantic comedy, but a hidden lesson about how the Internet has affected the music industry

“Begin Again” has played to some big audiences and gotten a
lot of attention, although late-night at Angelika-Mosaic (after the storms) the
crowd was pretty small. A movie about
musicians trying to make it and a hard-luck “music agent” trying to make it back
after a busted marriage sounds like a sure hit, right?

Indeed, the film, from director John Carney and distributed
by The Weinstein Company and Exclusive Media, is pretty much a cookie-cutter
“indie” offering, now with big established A-list stars – intended for young
and early middle-age adults, a date movie, not necessarily very sexual but for
grown-ups, something the kids won’t relate to.

It helps that the film is set in New York City, with many
locations in Brooklyn, some familiar to me, and offers a lot of new songs (and
old ones, too, like “The Time Goes By” from Casablanca). There is a curious scene where the
instruments in a quartet play themselves.
One disco scene may have been shot at the Culture Club (not too far from
where I have stayed in NYC recently, the Iroquois in 44th St –
although the Yotel is my favorite). At
least two of the extras look familiar to me from my own visits, including Ian
Brodsky, playing an ensemble violinist.

Mark Ruffalo, as Dan, does parade his hairy and ripening
body (he’s now 45) often enough, in domestic scenes where he returns home to an
ex-wife (Catherine Keneer) who thinks he’s nothing, after chaperoning his
teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) through business meetings as a record
executive, where he gets canned.

So, he just has to rescue his own life (screenwriter’s
urgency) so he meets amateur songwriter Greta (Keira Knightley), and rescues
her from amateurism before he heads back to London.

There's an interesting line where the daughter says to dad, "I'm a kid. I don't have my own money."

The film deals with the problems the music industry has in
making money today. Greta doesn’t even
want to bother with CD’s – at least with the $20 kind; she just wants to go
directly to iTunes and Amazon, maybe YouTube, and get a few cents from each
$0.99 sale. That plays into the issue of
consumers expecting “free” content and being sued, in the past, for illegal P2P
downloads, and with the whole anti-piracy debate, which had led Congress to
propose SOPA in 2011; the film doesn’t
quite go there explicitly.

The official site is here. The film opened at the Toronto Film Festival
in September 2013, just after completion, apparently, and played at Tribeca
also in 2014.

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